"What am I going to do for the next 10 years of my life? Am I
going to fight for 1% market share, or am I going to make 10 more
Androids?" Rubin said of his decision to leave.

After taking a break to mow lawns, he joked, Rubin has returned
to tech as a venture capitalist with a passion to look for the
next frontier beyond the market-dominating Android operating
system he created.

Rubin created Playground
Global, a new venture-capital fund and hardware incubator
that closed a $300 million round on Monday. Part of its mission
is betting on the next big thing, "the thing beyond the mobile or
the tablet," Rubin said.

"Mobile isn’t going away," Rubin said, assuaging an audience
gathered at the Code/Mobile conference in Half Moon Bay,
California. "There is a point in time — I have no idea when it is
— it won't be in the next 10 years, or 20 years — where there is
some form of AI, for lack of a better term, that will be the next
computing platform.”

With the rise of connected devices like smart thermostats and
door locks, the world increasingly generates data.
Simultaneously, computers are getting better at absorbing that
data, learning from it, and making decisions such as whether to
lower or raise the heat in your house.

"When you spend all your time interacting with a screen, you have
to start thinking about things that don't have a screen," he
said.

Take ConnectedYard, a startup Rubin has already put money into.
The company's pHin device, a
teardrop-shaped floating pod, is designed to measure PH in your
pool. It may seem like a small idea, but the device isn't just
feeding data into your phone passively, Rubin said.

Instead, the startup orders pellets and delivers them via FedEx
so people can dump them in their pool to take corrective action
without the owner needing to even know what's wrong in the first
place. It's not easy, though, to get from sensing that a pool is
out of balance or that the heat is on too high to knowing
what steps to take to get it back to normal.

"The thing that's going to be new is the part of the cloud that
is forming the intelligence for all of the information that is
coming back," Rubin said.